


Shed Cocoon

by Sub_Rosa



Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Self-Indulgent, Trans Female Character, Trans Girl Marco Diaz, Very Alien Star Butterfly, pre-season 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2018-10-04 23:49:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10292699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a girl who had forgotten that she wasn’t a boy, and a girl who had forgotten that she wasn’t a human.





	1. Chapter 1

Marco Diaz’ first impression of Star Butterfly is this: that she needs more help than he can ever give her. Either that, or that she doesn’t need any help at all.

He meets her for the first time in the school hallway while she’s chewing on a water fountain and while the principal is trying to get him to show her around school. Normally, he wouldn’t mind. He _shouldn’t_ mind. Maybe he’s being asked to help her because he’s as meek as he is, but he likes helping people. He doesn’t feel enthusiastic about helping Star, though. He feels all wrong.

She skips as he walks; the way she moves is just as wrong as Marco feels. Like her joints are dragging her along, and the rest of her body is following after them. Her eyes flutter just a bit too much, not in the eyelids but in the pupils, skittering with saccades and the swimming of her pupils. In and out, dilation and contraction. She doesn’t seem to breathe. Her body is quiet save for the (rather endearing) noise she makes as she chews on a brightly-colored pink toy.

She spends the most time looking at other people. And looking at herself, in the vague reflections of glass windows. Curious and awestruck. Marco feels as if he is an intruder stepping into a private moment.

Perhaps it _is_ a private moment. Who is he to judge?

“So what brings you to Echo Creek Academy?” he asks, slipping into the pause between her aimless verbal exploration.

“Oh.” Star nods. “Yeah, um, that’s a long story.”

“We have time. Unless you don’t want to talk about it?”

“No, it’s not that bad.” Star shrugs. “I just kind of accidentally caused mass destruction, so my parents decided to send me to Earth until I got a handle on my magic.”

_Was that a joke?_

Well, if she doesn’t want to tell the truth, that’s okay too.

“Magic, huh?”

“Yeah,” Star nods. “Like this!”

That’s when she waves the pink toy in her hand in her hand around, as if it were a real magical wand, and it turns out that it _is_ a real magical wand after all. Rainbows spout from nowhere into the air, and animals are conjured from nowhere (it _can’t_ be nowhere, where would the mass come from?). Somehow, he had always thought that learning all of his fundamental assumptions about the function of the universe were wrong would be more dramatic, but it wasn’t. Reality kept on going around him, despite the fact that he’d just seen magic.  _Magic._

It _can't_  be magic. It can't be. There's no way at all.

“You have real magic,” Marco says dumbly.

“Of course!” she says. “I’m a magical princess from another dimension! It’s nice to meet you!”

Either she is exactly that, or she is _really_ good at pulling things over on him.

(she still hasn't breathed)

“I…” Marco trails off. “I think I need to go home _right now_.”

He leaves her behind, and she is _smiling_.

“Bye, new friend!” She calls out. _Bye, new friend. Bye, new friend._

 _Bye, new friend_.

The words stick in his mind all of the way home, even when he knows he should be worrying about the chewing-out his parents will give him for skipping school. And yet, he doesn’t get a chewing-out at all.

“Come meet the new foreign exchange student who will be living with us!” his mother says.

It isn’t right. They _don’t care_. Star conjures a cadre of _laser-spewing puppies_ , and they don’t care. They’re supposed to care. They’re supposed to be good parents. They’re supposed to be grown-ups, and yet they don’t think about any of this.

They take the madness of Star Butterfly for granted like they’ve known her for all of their life. It _isn’t natural_.

Marco Diaz looks at Star Butterfly, and he is more terrified than he has ever been before. He can’t trust his expectations, he can’t trust his parents, maybe he can’t even trust himself. Because if Star could make his parents do what she wants, then maybe she could make him do what she wants, too.

“Why are you here?” Marco asks her, as he takes her too her room. “Really?”

“Because the Principal of our school told me to come here!” she says, carefree. “My parents set everything up with your parents and the school, you know. At least, I think so.”

Well that’s a relief, at least. He thinks. He’s always sort of been uncomfortable with the way his parents took in so many exchange students. It’s always seemed a sort of kindness more out of obligation than out of compassion. But these are cruel thoughts, and he has never wanted to be so cynical. At least this time maybe they aren’t taking it too far of their own will. Maybe they’ve been made to do it by whatever (whoever) Star’s parents are. Or maybe his parents are just a bit too accepting and gullible and open-minded, and Marco just never inherited that from them.

“Well, here’s your new room,” he says to her. She grins with excitement.

“Ooh, it’s just right!” she says. “Well, no, it isn’t. But I can work with it!”

She waves her wand again, and then - _no_. The room he knew is gone, replaced by something different that bulges out of the walls of the house. Hopefully they won’t be sued by the homeowner’s association. It’s a nice room, soft and obviously a girl’s room without being completely overdone. It’s also very spacious.

“I wish _I_ had a room like this,” he muses. Because of the spaciousness, of course.

Star takes that as an excuse to destroy his room in an attempt to make it like hers. With a black hole.

_“I just kind of accidentally caused mass destruction.”_

He storms out, disgusted and confused and afraid. This isn’t how anything is supposed to work, or fit together. The world shouldn’t work like this, but it does.

Star finds him camped outside of the local convenience store.

“I didn’t get a choice about coming to earth,” she says, a little bitterly. “It’s only fair that you get a choice about living with me, the kind of choice I never got. I’ll go, so you don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

This is ridiculous. He shouldn’t feel so bad about wanting to keep this invader out of his life. But he does.

“Wait,” Marco says. “I don’t want you to go.” It’s not even a lie. He wonders again about the absolute acquiescence he sees in his father, his mother - but is that something he can blame her for? Is it a thing that needs blame? “I want you to stay with us.”

“Really?” Star beams. “Hugs!”

She hugs him just as she says, her emotions too-telegraphed, her body language wavering between incomprehensibly happy and just incomprehensible. He can’t tell if she’s an open book, or just a palimpsest.

This is when the monsters attack (because _of course_ there are monsters), and he sees more of her magic. Beams of narwhals like light, beating the creatures that are trying to assault her into submission. It’s childish and silly. It’s cute. Maybe he should never have been afraid.

_“I’m a magical princess from another dimension!”_

Another dimension. _Alien_. Is he seeing things that aren’t even there? Is she just the unusual person that she looks to be, or is she one step removed to begin with? These are ugly thoughts, and Marco can’t bear to give voice to them.

“Is there any reason that you want to stay with us?” Marco asks. Star’s answer is simple enough.

“Is there any reason why _not?_ You’re nice, and your family is nice. I’d like to be your friend.”

The two of them walk home, unmolested further by human or alien, and Star rights his accidentally-destroyed bedroom before he wishes her goodnight (like a good host should). And then she’s asleep, and he is alone. He goes to bed without brushing his teeth or changing into pajamas.

_“I wish I had a room like this!”_

Cocooned within his warm (and worn) comforter, Marco stares at the grain of the paint on his ceiling, and not for the first time, he considers the distance between what he thinks he wants (what he’s supposed to want), and what he actually wants. The distance between what he means to say, what he actually says, and what other people hear.

“Grow up,” he whispers to himself, too exhausted to say anything else. He’s the only one to hear the message, and the only one around to take the message to heart.

He wishes he was someone else. But this, too, is an ugly thought, and he will never give voice to it. Ever.


	2. Chapter 2

_Maybe it’s in the elbows,_ Marco thinks, when Star reaches across the breakfast table to pour herself a bowl full of cereal. _Maybe it’s the elbows that are making me so uneasy_.

This is a ridiculous train of thought to start going down, but it has to be _something_ that’s off about Star Butterfly. There has to be some reason that he is so ridiculous about this. From the corner of his eye, Star herself is all wrong, too long in some places and too short in others. And then he looks her dead on, and the glimpse is gone. He feels ill for even doing this, trying to pick her body apart for errors. Will someone dissect him, some day, for his oddities?

He can already see it: eyes all on him and finding him wanting - but that’s making things about _him_ again. Star flexes her arm, bringing a spoon of cereal to her mouth. She moves with the sound of twig and carapace, bending but not breaking. _Creak_.

In how many ways is she different from him (he is different from her, and girls like her, he will _always_ be different), anyways? How could he even count the ways? The only thing he can recognize is her eyes, normal and blue with the color of the sky, unlike the ache-pink sheen of the hearts on her cheeks, the smooth and untextured enamel-straw of her hair.

“Is something wrong, Marco?” she asks him, looking at him with visible concern. She’s gotten better at that, at showing what she’s feeling. Some things remain, but she’s adjusted herself. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Like almost everything else Star says, it’s unnervingly literal. “Do ghosts exist, Star?”

“Just about everything exists, Marco.” She laughs infectiously, as if she’s dispensing simple humor instead of metaphysical truths. “Ghosts, though? I dunno. Depends on what you mean by ‘ghost’. And on where you’re looking for them.”

Marco can imagine himself as a ghost, in his mind’s eye, continuing to ‘live’ even after he’s dead and supposed to be gone. Staying with his friends and family (just his family, really). The thought should be reassuring - he knows that death is a bad thing, an awful thing, and any claim otherwise just seems a suspiciously convenient excuse as to why worrying isn’t worthwhile.

Somehow, the idea is _not_ reassuring. Marco takes a bite of his own cereal. The milk is lukewarm.

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” Marco asks.

“Well, no. But until I met you, I’d never seen a Marco Diaz. You still existed, though, didn’t you?” She gasps. “Didn’t you? I hope you _did_ exist.”

It’s sweet of her, honestly. He looks her in her eyes, a little too large for her sylph face, and can’t find a lie. Has she ever lied to _his_ face?

“Of course I existed,” he says, on reflex.

He adds some more cold milk to what’s left of his cereal. It’s still soggy.


	3. Chapter 3

Marco’s first impression of Pony Head is that she’s even more terrifying than Star is. This is because unlike Star, Pony Head is probably _trying_ to be utterly terrifying.

“I hate your face, plus you’re ugly,” Pony Head says to him, her too-short muzzle pressed up against his too-big nose. Straightforward enough. Finally, an extra-dimensional alien that Marco can make up his mind about.

“Just kidding!” Pony Head says.

This, too, is actually pretty straightforward. This is why Marco has never tried to make friends with girls, before; as long as he’s in their outgroup, so many of them are prickly and venomous enough that he could never get into their ingroup even if he went through the twelve labors of Hercules. Boys, at least, are laid-back enough to let him try to be friends without giving him a tongue-lashing.

Well, it’s not like boys can’t play “mean girls” too - they can and they will sublimate and redirect their aggression in the most inventive of ways, if you give them the incentive. It’s just that they normally try beating you up, first, leveraging their cleverness to get away with it - and it’s always easier to heal from a black eye than it is from a smear campaign. Whoever first said “sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me” was obviously a patronizing jerkwad.

Kind of like Pony Head seems to be, actually. The girl herself is just about what she’s made out to be: the flying, disembodied head of a unicorn. Dripping with _glitter._ With a _light blue_ coat and a _pink_ mane (god, he hopes it’s just a dye job). And what role does glitter serve for her, biologically, anyways?

This is actually distracting enough that he can’t keep focused on the fact that Pony Head hates him.

“Come on, Marco,” Star says, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him over to the corner of the lawn. “Let’s party with Pony Head! We have enough people now, the three of us, anyways - two people going to a club is weird but four people going out to a club is too cluttered. Three is just right. Like a tricycle!”

“I don’t think my parents want me going out to any clubs,” he says weakly.

Pony Head lets out a little snort of derision. Star doesn’t notice, because she’s too busy looking at Marco like he just personally killed her puppy.

“...but, I guess we can go anyways?” Marco says. “That’s me, you know. Marco Diaz, misunderstood rule-breaking bad boy.”

“Beautiful!” Star says, and that’s about when Pony Head coughs up a pair of scissors. _How did she not choke to death on those? Does she even have a stomach?_

_Don’t think about it, Marco._

Then Pony Head manages to use her teeth to work the scissors into cutting open a hole in the air ( _Don’t think about it, Marco_ ), and Star - single-minded Star - drags the both of them through the portal into the Bounce Lounge.

He doesn’t even know how to party. He’s never even _been_ to a party before. Partying is something that Other People do because Other People are popular enough to get invited to parties, unlike him. The closest thing he’s ever experienced to a party is his own birthday parties, with Ferguson and Alfonzo as the only guests. Sometimes Marco thinks they only came for the cake and pizza.

The problem is obvious. The solution, less so. Marco just has to hang out by the punch bowl until it all blows over.

“Listen up, Earth turd,” Pony Head says, about as menacingly as any disembodied unicorn head can be. “I don’t like you, in case you’re too stupid to figure that out on your own, and I never will.”

“Okay,” Marco says. “I get it. You probably think I’m-” _don’t say ‘horning in’, don’t say it_ “-butting in on your friendship with Star.”

“I don’t think that, because you’re _not_ friends with her.”

Obviously. No-one is ever _really_ friends with him. He’s too distant and weird and safety-obsessed. Star isn’t any more his friend than any other foreign exchange student living in his house.

“What I _do_ think is that you’re her latest fixation. Either way, I’m not going to let you mess up this night with Star. You get that? So stay out of the way.”

Marco’s watch doesn’t work in the Bounce Lounge, and the punch (hyperbolic orange in color and sweeter than should be possible) makes him gag. He watches the partygoers pass by; it’s sort of the ultimate exercise in people-watching. Most of them look like humans, somehow softened and abstracted. Others are as alien as can be - robots and monsters, spilling over the edges of the place and one or two of them falling off.

“Is something wrong, Marco?” Star asks him, having managed to creep up on him without a sound. “You’re not dancing.”

“I don’t know how to dance very well,” Marco lies. “The last time I tried to learn, I was apparently so bad that my teacher hated me for the next three weeks.”

“Oh no, that’s terrible! I would help to teach you, but I don’t want to hate you, too.” Star looks away, scanning the lounge for Pony Head. Her hair glows with a grue halo in the orange light of the punch bowl, and her skin is bleen.

This is how how Marco unintentionally convinces Star to convince Pony Head to take them to an arcade, apparently. This is a relief, because even if Marco will never ever know how to party the way that Star and Pony Head do (he will never ever learn, of course, because he’s not like they are), at least he knows how to play video games.

The arcade is a gorgeous sight to see, lit up with a gentle purple glow that illuminates the three of them and the crowds of two-dimensional squares that populate the dimension. They’re literally two-dimensional, too. Invisible from the side. He holds out a hope that he won’t run into one of them from the wrong angle and get cut into pieces.

It’s after his third or fourth game of Lance Lance Revolution that Marco realizes Star and Pony Head are nowhere in sight.

“Star? Pony Head?”

He steps off of the platform, and several of the squares step up to fill his place, bickering for the Player One slot. His eyes hang over the crowd, looking over their heads, but they’re still no-where to be found.

“Star? Pony Head, I swear if you left me here then I’m going to… I don’t know, unleash some karate on you!”

From the center of the arcade, he makes his way to the edge, and starts scaling the slopes of the craggy walls, which are themselves really just slanted floors, rising to meet the ceiling of the cavern. From his higher vantage point,  he takes another look.

Nothing. The icicle vendor over by the opposite side of the room doesn’t have Star either. They’re gone. They’re _gone_ . He’s lost. He’s _lost_. Crap. What is he supposed to do?

Next to him, playing on one of the game booths set into the wall, there’s a cool green square playing what looks to be a first-person shooter.

“Excuse me?” Marco asks. “Do you know where I can find the exit to this place?”

“What game and level?” the square says, not taking her eyes off of the screen.

“Game-? No, you don’t understand. Where is the exit to this room of the arcade?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the square says. “This is the only room of the arcade.”

Marco’s heart skips a beat.

“R-really? Well, can you at least tell me how to get back to Earth, or to the Bounce Lounge? I seem to have lost my friends.”

The square makes a disgruntled noise. “Oh, so you’re a tourist. Sorry, buddy, we don’t have any built-in portals around here.”

 _No. She must be joking_.

“We - we can’t get into any other dimensions? We’re trapped here!?”

“Speak for yourself,” the square says. “Boo hoo, I’m ‘trapped’ in what must be the most amazing place in the entire universe. _Yawn_.”

On-screen, the square’s character eats a bullet to the face. She frowns a bit, and then restarts the level without complaint.

This doesn’t make any sense. It can’t be true. Marco can’t be stuck here, in this gloomy cave of wonders. He can’t accept it. “But - you can’t _live_ here! What do you eat and drink?”

“Eating?” the square asks. “You mean, like the game mechanic?”

“No!” Marco yells with frustration, disrupting her concentration. “In real life!”

“Are you kidding? Why would I do that in real life?”

Marco blinks. “You don’t need to eat.”

Oh no. No no no no. He’s going to starve to death. He’s going to get his water from the icicle vendor and he’s going to go out with a miserable wasting death. What was he thinking? He should never have agreed to this. He should have pestered Star and Pony Head into letting him go home. But he didn’t, because he was too stupid to understand.

“What do you _do?_ ” Marco asks. “You can’t, you can’t just play video games forever! Won’t you get bored!? There’s no _point_.”

“How could I get bored?” the square scoffs. “There’s always new games coming out, and there’s strategy games to play, and shoot-em-ups, and horror games, and platformers, and walking simulators-”

“Aside from video games!” Marco says. “There’s more to life than video games! Like, like television, and books, and…”

It occurs to Marco that perhaps he doesn’t have a good grasp of life after all, but that’s not really the point he’s trying to make.

“Ugh. Visual novels are better.” The square shakes her head (her body) with pity. “Have you tried any? _Fake/Slay Bright_ is what everyone recommends to beginner VN readers, but really, it’s way too perverted and complicated, and it’s definitely not as good as it’s made out to be. Here, over by the west side of the arcade, there’s this really lovely indie VN about-”

“VIsual novels aren’t video games!” Marco says harshly. “You’re cheating! And besides, there’s more to life than v-  than just consuming media! What about friendships? And family? Don’t you have _people_ in your life?”

“Well, no. Why would I ever want to interact with real people?”

Marco gapes, his jaw on the floor.

“You tourists are so weird - you come here to play our video games, just like us, and then you berate us for doing what _you’re_ doing.”

“It’s not weird to ‘berate’ you!” Marco insists. “You can’t all live your life like this! You’d get bored!”

“And why not? Maybe _your_ need for novelty and sense of boredom is so cancerously overgrown that you have to entertain yourself with things in real life - _yuck_ , you poor thing - but not ours. No, thank you, we’re all happy just where we are. Now buzz off.”

Numbly, Marco slid down the face of the wall and came to rest at the bottom. It was insane. They were insane. They were all _insane_ . This dimension was insane and he was going to _die_ here. He was going to _die_. Some distant part of him bubbled out with a giggle. Was he going to be a ghost, now? Ridiculous.

That’s about when the ridiculously bulked-up men in masks and full soldier’s regalia grab him by the shoulders and drag him into the nearest open pavilion. Apparently things can get worse after all.

He feels something stretch a little too far in his arm, and stifles a scream of pain. He’s such a baby.

“I suppose you’re the one that was shouting about Princess Pony Head earlier, hm?” the man before him growls. “Tell me where she is.”

Oh for _fuck’s_ sake.

“First of all, I’m not in the business of tattling to creepers. Second of all, I’m only shouting for her because I don’t know where she is _either_ , you absolute idiot-!”

He hits Marco across the face. _Sticks and stones may break his bones but words may never hurt him._

It’s ten minutes later before Star and Pony Head finally show up, and by then his face and nose are a bloodied mess. He can’t quite spit out all of the taste of iron. Pony Head takes his place, but that doesn’t quite take away the sting.

And then she’s gone, taken (relatively) peacefully away to St. Olga’s, and Marco can’t quite shake the feeling that he’ll never see her again. This feels like a good thing, even, which just makes him sick through the pain stabbing through him.

“I’m so sorry, Marco,” Star says tearfully to him. “I didn’t know we were in so much danger. This is all my fault. I should have known something was up with Pony Head. What was I thinking?”

“It’s not your fault,” Marco says. “Where were you?”

Star scowls. “Pony Head tricked me into leaving you behind.”

Marco stares at Star for a few seconds, confused. “And you came back for me?”

“Well, duh! You’re my friend, Marco! I don’t abandon my friends! Ever!”

Star hasn’t blinked in over a minute, but for once, he doesn’t feel cold at all to look at her. He just feels warm. He could get used to it all. “You _are_ my friend, aren’t you? I guess that makes me your friend, too.”

She seems to vibrate with a brief moment of happiness.

He staggers to his feet, and Star reluctantly hands him the dimensional scissors that Pony Head left for the two of them. “You would know best how to get home with these. I never was any good with telling dimensional spaces apart.”

Space has all of the consistency of gelatin between the blades of the scissors. “Hey, Star?”

“Yes, Marco?”

“Earlier, I was talking to one of the squares. They’re not… they think they’re happy, where they are. How can that be true? How can they be happy?”

“Oh, Marco.” Star sighs. “I guess I forgot about that, too.”

He waits. He can actually see it, now. A human habit of forgetfulness instead of an alien logic of apathy.

“They’re not like us. I don’t know what to tell you. They’re… I can’t think of a word in your English or Spanish for them, I wish you knew Mewmish. They’re… echoes, or shadows, I guess. Husks?”

The arcade they’re leaving behind seems terribly claustrophobic, silhouettes crawling at their backs through the closing portal.

“Are they even people?”

“Well of course they’re _people_ , Marco. Just because they’re not as complicated as we are, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth anything.”

He feels terribly like a fool. “Sorry, I’m just… confused. Why are they even the way they are?”

“You might as well ask why water flows downhill - well, why water flows downhill in _most_ dimensions. It’s just their nature.”

In their nature, to think of nothing but video games, if they can help it. It seems so limited. Marco likes video games, but everything about the squares creeps him out, in retrospect. So… stunted. Crippled off and cut into shape.

“Were the people in the Bounce Lounge like that, too?”

“Some of them, for sure.”

Marco comes just short of the back door of his house (their house, now, isn’t it?). His parents are going to be upset on his behalf. Maybe even take him to the hospital. But something eats at him.

“What if… what if one of them didn’t want to be what they were? What if there was a square that didn’t want to play video games? Would they just be stuck there?”

Star chews on her lip a bit. “I don’t know, honestly. But that could never happen, so you don’t need to worry about it.”

She opens the door for him, and he steps back into his home.

“Well… I guess if there’s no need to worry.”

In the end, Star tries a _very_ minor healing spell on his nose, and it seems to work out alright. The exposed blood on his face washes away, Star assures him that the bruising can be covered up, in the morning, and and she only gets more confident with her magical talent - a dangerous thing, when she is on Earth for a reason.

Marco dreams that the men from earlier are holding him down again, holding him to a game console and forcing him to play every game he’s ever hated. These are not the kinds of things that a fourteen year old should be dreaming about, but he never had a choice.

Perhaps it’s just in his nature.


	4. Chapter 4

There is very little that Star Butterfly truly understands about Earth, but on some level, she understands that Earth is not what she thought it would be.

_“We're sending you to train in a safer dimension; a place called Earth.”_

Once, she had believed that Earth would be a place of training for her, and not for her behavior. If her parents wanted to change her behavior, she thought, they would have just sent her to St. Olga’s.

So instead she had believed that she had been sent to Earth to train in her skill and her magic. She had once believed that Earth would be a glorified training ground with room for the inevitable collateral damage.

After all, no-one important cares if you kill accidentally kill a few hundred thousand Earth-humans. They’re just the inhabitants of a backwater reductionist universe. But _everyone_ important cares if you kill a few hundred thousand Mewni-humans, even if they’re not royalty. No-one important wants to deal with the hassle of skimming the multiverse to acquire a replacement lower class, especially when it can be avoided.

Star’s mother calls this train of thought ‘pragmatism’. Star calls it ‘suspiciously lazy’, but only when she thinks no-one is around to hear her. Her father probably agrees, but what can he do?

Either way, though, Earth is not a place of training for her, because there is no-one to train her and no-one to teach her. There is the Magic Instruction Book, and Glossaryck, but he is opaque on the best of days and actively unhelpful on the worst of days. If only he could present knowledge, rather than incomprehensible enigmas.

No, Star is not training. She has been left to her own devices. Earth is a safe planet, safer than most, but she is more terrified than she has ever been. She has hunted for the Jabberwock of the Red Queens and the Dark Young of the Black Mother, and laid them low while they tried to lay her low, but this is something completely different. She has always had the Royal Guard waiting in the wings, or her parents at her side. She has always had a safety net.

She is left to her own devices, now. Her parents arranged for her stay here with a dartboard, a map, ten minutes of mesmerism and translation magic, and riches equivalent to a week of her allowance. They did not give her safety their all. There is a spell on her and on her wand, casting her in shades of stark innocence, the color of a friendly face, but does that really count as the supervision she is used to? She is alone.

She could create another black hole, and there would be no one to yank her from the rim of the event horizon. She could learn to forge starfire, and raze Earth to slag (and her along with), and it would be allowed to happen.

She is left alone, to sink or swim.

Perhaps this is some obscure test of her mother’s, to see what she will do when she is given absolute freedom. Perhaps her mother is cutting ties completely, for the destruction she caused to Mewni. Or perhaps she has been simply _shelved_. Set aside, while complicated questions of inheritance and politics are sorted out back on Mewni (and not necessarily in her favor). It would have been nice to know the truth, but her mother sent her off with a polite lie about _training_.

That woman can be worse than Glossaryck, sometimes, in some ways. That woman is all about her polite lies. The worst part is that Star can’t completely begrudge her.

But that still leaves her off where she started: trying to understand Earth, so that she might enjoy it while it lasts. She still barely understands it.

On her first day, she looks at her wand, and at the spell meant to slide her into the status quo of Earth like a knife into flesh. This is a bloodless knife, though. She could live on Earth for years and people would give her the same notice as they would give anyone else. _Harmless_. But how will she ever understand Earth enough to enjoy it, if people look at her with tired and bored eyes?

She remembers the people of Mewni, taking her every action in stride as if they expected it. _She’s the Princess, she’s royalty, of course she’s going to act out. Don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing you react._

 _Act like it’s nothing_.

She always wanted them to _acknowledge_ her, but they _wouldn’t_. It had made her so angry she wanted to scream, she had felt so powerless and unseen. And now, she is still unseen. Perhaps this is her mother’s own punishment for her, to be normal in a lonely world.

Back at Mewni, Star would have the solace of being the true center of the universe, living at the epicenter of a celestial sphere of stars, embedded in narratives and stories. She was _recognized_ by nothing less than _everything_. But now, she doesn’t even have that, because she is stuck on a speck of rock swinging around a glob of flaming gas and metal, in a void so large that it dwarfs her entire life to date, embedded in cold smears of _math_. This whole universe might as well be hers, and it is an utter waste, a scope to mock her. There is nothing, nothing, nothing!

Star doesn’t want to take this in stride. She doesn’t even want to be a Princess, she just wants someone to admit she exists as something in herself. _See me! Aren’t I Star Butterfly! Am I not Star Butterfly!?_

People look at her like she is one of them, so she does something very, very stupid. She strips away a thread of magic, and Marco Diaz looks at her with clear eyes. It is an anchor, of sorts. An unfiltered look into what Earth might be like. An unfiltered look, for him, at what she is. She is something in herself.

Earth is a strange place indeed. The divisions between things are softer than she is used to. The humans of Earth haven’t learned to tap other dimensions for resources (exotic or otherwise), but they get by comfortably, ruthlessly optimizing the scant resources they _do_ have access to. Star can almost forget that this universe is the kind of place where life goes to die; she can forget that this is the kind of universe where only the hardiest extremophiles among all the humanities and aliens can eke out a living.

(Marco calls it all ‘science’ and ‘technology’. He, like Star’s mother, insists that it isn’t magic at all. They’re obviously wrong on that - a thing isn’t any less magical just because you are able to explain it, or because it only exists in one place at a time.)

Marco’s family gets by so comfortably, in fact, that it takes several weeks before Star realizes that the Diaz family isn’t high-class, in comparison to the rest of the Kingdom where she now lives. Artifice allows Marco to conjure fire and heat, ice and cold, light and dark, to process leagues of information within servitor-minds, to work with messages sent invisibly through space. To view slideshow-pictures (Marco does not seem to notice the gaps between the slides) and listen to conjured sounds and music. All services that you normally wouldn’t see on Mewni except in the royalty, or the fortunate middle class.

She thinks that this makes Marco and his family amazing, and insists on keeping one of them around at all times so they can work the akashic record they call “Google”. It’s possible that Marco thinks this is insulting (she struggles to tell, sometimes), so she tries to reassure him that she values him as more than a servant wielding a tool.

“Would you cast spells for me, if I asked you to as a friend?” he asks.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Star says.

“It’s the same way,” Marco replies. “You can always ask for my help.”

This is reassuring. Star likes having a friend. Marco is an Earth friend she made all on her own, without mesmerism or royal connections, or such cheap tricks. Having a friend is warm and cozy, like a blanket.

(Marco does not make a very comfortable _physical_ blanket, unfortunately.)

_“What if… what if one of them didn’t want to be what they were? What if there was a square that didn’t want to play video games? Would they just be stuck there?”_

But Marco is looking for something, she can tell. It aches as surely as her own ignorance aches. He’s looking for something that he doesn’t even know what it is. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for, either. She can’t be of much help to one of her best and only friends.

For a time, her understanding was going up, but it seems to be plateauing again. It might even be slipping. The mask she wears is growing itchy and loose.

One day, she sees Marco napping on the couch, splayed out with an arm rolling over the side. She brings her wand up to his heart, scanning with a guilty kind of curiosity.

_“Who are you, then? Who are you when ‘Star Butterfly’ is peeled away?”_

He’s not like her, she can tell.

_“I’m a royal Mewman, mom. ‘I am not a person wearing a crown, I am a crown wearing a person.’”_

He’s just a human. Just like everyone else on this planet, in this dimension.

_“A crown wearing a ‘person’?”_

What he is looking for is not what she is looking for. She is still alone.

 _“I mean... ‘I am a crown wearing a_ mask _.’”_

And she still cannot help him.

_“Good. Always remember - you might allow your mask to fall away, and you might have your wings torn off, but what lies above is forever unchanged.”_

But maybe it’s just all in her imagination. Maybe Marco isn’t looking for anything at all. It’s so hard to tell, when the distance between her and her mask (between her and her crown) is so engulfing.

_“And what lies below is your own, so long as you remember what it is: a role to be played.”_

She pulls herself tighter around herself. She feels ill. She ignores it.

She ends up napping next to Marco, at the base of the couch. She’s tired enough not to think about how hard the floor is. And she welcomes that exhaustion, because it means everything.


	5. Chapter 5

Deep breaths, _in_ and _out_.

Marco centers himself like he is already at the center of everything, staring down at the rough-cut wooden planks. He imagines that everything he’s ever wanted is on the other side of the cheap particle-board.

His gi-clad arm whips downwards, lashing sharply through the sawdust and then meeting nothing but empty air. The bottom of his hand aches comfortably, and he pauses to shake it out.

“Woah, Marco? You hate wood too?”

Marco glances up from the mess he’s made. “Star?”

“Marco!”

Star Butterfly looms over him, brimming with curiosity.

“Why would I hate wood?” Marco asks. “Why would _you_ hate wood, anyways?”

“Because trees are scary,” Star says frankly.

“What?”

“They’re the perfect ambush predators!” Star begins counting points off on her long fingers. “They can sit still for _centuries_ , just waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The body of a tree is more durable than any part of an animal, short of shell or bone. They’re strong enough to drill through earth and rock. They don’t even _need_ to eat to survive! They can just sit still and steal your sunlight.”

Marco considers this. “First of all, the trees around here don’t move, except in the wind, so I think you’re safe.”

Privately, Marco is rather sure that Star would be safe anyways, even if trees _did_ move. The power to transmute your opponents into narwhals is more powerful than any amount of musclepower a predator-tree could bring to the table.

He also saw Star survive a fall at terminal velocity just a few days ago, when the two of them exited the Elemental Plane of Noble Gases, so...

“Second of all,” Marco says, “why would a tree bother with being a predator, if it could just survive on sunlight?”

Star looks at Marco like he just asked the stupidest question imaginable. “Why wouldn’t it? Even trees need something to do with their spare time.”

Marco shrugs, while Star pics up a piece of the particle board. She starts chewing on it, like a dog gnawing on the marrow of a bone.

“I… anyways. No, I _don’t_ hate wood. I’m practicing for my upcoming Tang Soo Do tournament.”

“Is that why you’re wearing pyjamas?” Star asks earnestly. “Ooh, what’s Tang Soo Do like? Are you going tree-hunting?”

“No, and no. I’m practicing martial arts so I can beat all of the other kids.”

Marco puts down another plank of particle board over the cinderblocks he’s set up in his room. His arm descends in an arc; splinters dot Star’s forehead.

“Ooh. Well, I know some martial arts.” Star looks back out of the corner of her eye. “I’m _technically_ not supposed to teach what I know to other people. But… what my mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Want to learn?”

“Erm. No. I need to learn Tang Soo Do, not… _Butterfly-Rending-All-of-Creation Style_ , or whatever you practice.”

“It’s called _Butterfly-Poise-of-Substantiated-Grace Style_ , thank you very much,” Star huffs. Marco can’t tell if she’s irritated, and very bad at showing it, or if she’s being sarcastic, and very good at showing it.

“You’re welcome,” Marco says. “Although… even if I can’t learn what you would teach, I’d love to spar with you.”

Fifty seconds later, Marco’s arm is broken in three places.

===

“I’m so sorry!” Star says. “I’m used to fighting trees, not people!”

Marco groans from his position on the couch. His arm is embalmbed and immobilized in a hardened, perfect resin. Star was able to provide the makeshift cast with a perverse ease, because _apparently_ she secretes building material from the back of her throat, for whatever reason.

It smells kind of nice too. Marco’s spit only smells and tastes like spit. Not that he’s jealous or anything.

“You’d better tell me that you’ve learned some kind of awesome healing magic since the last time I got hurt.”

Star looks away.

“Star. Didn’t you promise?”

“I forgot,” Star says, averting her face rather than just her eyes. “I was busy learning hairstyling magic.”

“...why?” Marco asks. A stab of sudden horror and apprehension rends through him, he _knows_ that he won’t like the answer-

“Hair is way more complicated than bodies,” Star explains.

“Complicated-ness never stopped you before.”

“Yeah, but if I style my hair wrong, I have a bad hair day or go bald. If I heal a body wrong, I create a rampaging monster or a puddle of gelatin.”

Spurred on by the pain in his arm, his apprehension inflates into vertigo, and he fights back the urge to vomit. “Don’t _say that!_ I _just ate_ some Jello!”

“Sorry? The last time I didn’t talk about magical consequences everything went wrong, and then you asked me to _always_ explain how spells could go wrong!”

He had.

“I… nevermind.” Marco grits his teeth. “Listen, you know I trust you.” Well, he trusts her as a person, if not as a spellcaster. But he doesn’t want to tell his mother that the new exchange student brutalized him. He _likes_ Star.

Star has done a lot of strange things, and he really (sort of) believes that there is something wrong with everyone else but him, not to see the strangeness. But _hurting him_ might be a stone too far for his parents.

Also, they don’t deserve the hospital bills.

“Yup, I know you trust me.”

“So… I trust you to try to heal me.”

Star bites her lip. “Really?”

“Really really.”

She nods her head, and looks underneath her bed, and she pages through a massive spellbook that makes Marco’s eyes hurt just to look at.

She waves her wand, and Marco’s arm uncoils into a great ribbon of coiling hair.

“Oops,” Star says. “I was thinking too hard about _not_ using hair-management spells, which is basically the same thing as trying to not think about the Pink Elephant.”

“A pink elephant?”

“No, the Pink Elephant. With capital letters and everything.”

“What exactly is that?”

_Why did you_ ask _that, you idiot, you keep establishing that Star has no filter for things that could disgust and/or terrify you-_

“If I told you the details, then it would kill you.” Star explains absently, continuing to page through the book. “So don’t just think about it at all… here we go, this should work! Conceptual regeneration.”

“U-uh, can you really just put the word ‘conceptual’ before a spell to make it work?”

“Only when the stars are right.”

“And _are_ the stars right?”

It’s too late. Star waves her wand over the blonde rope of his arm, and it arm explodes into purple tentacles.

“Maybe I should keep trying,” Star says apologetically.

He ends up falling asleep before Star can fix the thing. He wakes up and Star still hasn’t managed to fix the thing, but at he can move his arm without pain and that’s all he can ask for, really. His _real_ arm isn’t any prettier than this thing, and there’s something terribly wrong with everyone else so no-one will notice anyways.

_Girls_ like his arm. When he doesn’t pay attention, his arm acts without his own input. It makes him want to crawl out of his skin, like he’s a bit of gristle hanging off of his arm and his arm is more alive than he is.

He ends up falling asleep _again_ -

===

“You know, you _could_ crawl out of your skin,” says his arm. “There’s nothing stopping you. You can do _anything_.”

“I don’t think that’s actually true,” Marco says, mired in dream-logic.

“Why not? Everyone makes you uncomfortable. Why do you put up with them?”

“Just because I don’t want to put up with them, that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t.”

His arm laughs. “Shouldn’t? Don’t _moralize_ , as if you don’t already know that nothing you do will ever matter.”

Marco doesn’t deny it just yet.

“Your own universe is forty-five thousand thousand thousand trillion kilometers wide and then some, you wouldn’t know the end of your universe if you saw it with your own eyes. How many universes do you think there are out there? How much room is there, for you to find copies of people just like you and everyone you care about?

“You are insignificant and nothing you ever do will make a difference, not just for the world at large, but for the people you love, because there will always be more versions of them, somewhere out there, living their own lives every which way. The only thing you can do is choose what kind of world you _personally_ want to live in.”

Marco looks down at the dimensional scissors in his hand. “You’re wrong. If it was really that simple… then Star would just have left by now. She would have found a world where she would be just happy, just like the squares and the dancers at the party, and she would never leave.”

“You’re only guessing,” says Marco’s arm. “What do _you_ think you know about the multiverse? Why not leave, to try and find a world you can enjoy? You _know_ that Star is a monster, or failing that, a freak too stupid to understand what she’s doing to the people around her. You imagine leaving her behind sometimes. Do it.”

“You don’t know anything about the multiverse that I don’t,” Marco protests. “And I won’t leave her behind. She’s my friend! Even if none of this matters, it has to matter, I have to believe that, I have to believe in something!”

“You’re only _pretending_ to believe that,” says his arm. “Playing make-believe. So just leave Star behind. Do it.”

“No!”

“DO IT, BOY!”

_Rage, anger, defiance, how-dare-you-tell-me-what-I-am-and-what-to-do_. “No! I won’t!”

“LEAVE HER BEHIND! CHOKE HER, CRUSH HER, SMASH HER, TWIST HER UNTIL YOU HEAR THE _CRUNCH, DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT KILL HER BEFORE SHE CAN KILL ME-_ ”

His own arm is wrapped around his throat, he can’t breathe-

Marco wakes up and his arm hurts like it’s been pulled out of the socket, and his throat hurts like the worst thing he’s ever felt, and his head is spinning like he’s about to die.

“I... found the spell to restore your arm,” Star says quietly. “I think it tried to fight back.”

His arm hurts, but it’s healed. It is not about to fall apart at the seams into shards of broken bones. The black cloud over his vision is clearing.

“That was a better outcome than being turned into gelatin,” Marco admits. “But let’s never ever try anything like that ever again.”

She nods, and leaps forward spontaneously to hug him. She’s trembling with fear.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I’m alright.” Star hugs him tighter. “You’re alright.”

Marco wears a scarf to his Tang Soo Do tournament, and no-one asks twice because it’s a mediocre suburban dojo. His arm is gimped and he only gets into third place. His parents congratulate him like they always do.

Whenever he bends his arm, it makes the same sound that Star makes whenever she moves.

“How many universes are there, Star?” he asks her, flexing his arm back and forth like a stress toy.

“I don’t really know,” Star says apologetically. “They’re not _endless_ , but it’s not like you could count them, anyways.”

“Why not?” Marco asks.

“Because most of them aren’t even real, anyways. They’re just metaphors.”

This is a deeply unsatisfying answer, but more and more he’s starting to wonder if there can be a satisfying answer to every question.

“How many Star Butterflies are there?” he asks, trying again.

“Only one. Me!”

“Are there more of me, out there?”

“That would be quite strange indeed,” Star says. She reaches out, putting a hand over his face.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking your temperature. You’re acting strange.”

“So, first of all, that’s not how checking for a fever works. Second of all, I’m totally fine.”

“I don’t believe you, Marco.”

Marco shrugs. “I’m as fine as I ever am.”

She believes him.

He uses the scissors again, looking for alternate versions of the worlds and people he knows. He doesn’t find them. If they’re out there, he’ll never find them. There’s too many possibilities to search through. Too many metaphors.

But no, the dream-logic is obvious. You should _never_ listen to a twisted cancerous growth emerging from your own body, _especially_ if it has its own intelligence and it tells you to adopt nihilism and kill your friend. That’s just... _pitifully obvious_. His arm was a duplicitous, deceitful, disingenuous liar, and nothing more.

He leaves his bronze trophy on a shelf in his room, a plank of particle-board across cinder blocks. And that’s the end of it.


	6. Chapter 6

The worst day of Star’s life starts and ends with Oskar Greason.

“I just don’t understand why you think he’s so interesting,” Marco grumbles. “He is probably the least attractive boy in the entire school and he’s not even in the school! He’s a dropout!”

“Why? Are you jealous?”

“What?” Marco honestly can’t wrap his head around what she’s saying. “No? It’s just… you know. There are so many other boys who are way more attractive. Prettier boys. More handsome boys. Boys who don’t sing songs about teenage angst.”

(He doesn’t count himself in that list, but that’s just him being humble.)

“You don’t get it,” Star says with a little smile and a sigh. “You’re such a _boy_. The heart wants what the heart wants.”

It's one thing to be able to transform yourself into a narwhal. It's something else entirely to turn yourself into an entirely different kind of person, with a different heart. _That_ is a magic that Star isn’t sure she can do; certainly not while she is as she is now, wearing a mask and in human skin.

And why would she _want_ to do that, anyways?

“Uh, Star? You’ve got a little bit of paint on your forehead.”

“Again?” Star frowns, and reaches up to pick at it, peeling away a perfect heart-shaped scab of skin.

She looks at it, and the school bell rings to send them off to their next class, but she ignores the bell.

“No, no, no, no.” Star murmurs, dropping the flake of purple. “No, no, no…”

“Star?” Marco asks, confused. “Are you okay? Ah, I hope this isn’t another skin disease from that jungle universe.”

“No! It is not a skin disease!” Star says, her voice terrified. Her eyes are too-wide and fluttering. “This isn’t paint, either! This is Mewberty!”

The optimistic part of Marco wants to nod his head along and say, _oh, I have to deal with acne too, I do skin care_. The pessimistic part of Marco immediately realizes that if Star’s concept of puberty was exactly the same thing as his concept of puberty, she would just say ‘puberty’ instead of Mewberty. Therefore, she has a different conception of puberty and development. Therefore…

“Is that bad?”

“Yes!” Star grabs the lapel of his jacket and shakes him vigorously. “Marco, I need your help!”

“Y-yeah? Anything!”

“I need you to keep me away from boys.”

Um. “I don’t think I’m the best person to help you with that…? Oh, wait, I should not have pointed that out, should I?”

Too late. Star’s gaze is getting a little… fixated. He is so screwed. Why can’t he ever have a _normal_ day? Just one? He’s fine with all of the madness, but he just wanted _one_ day of being a normal fuckup kid!

But no, he has to be a _supernatural_ fuckup kid, because he left the scissors at home, so he has to try to get Star out of school without exposing her to half of the student population. It _obviously_ doesn’t work.

“Okay, new plan,” Marco says. “Do you think there might be a spell or something, in your spellbook, that would let us stop this?”

“Probably not.”

“Do we have a better plan?”

“No. Uh… I think I left my spellbook with Janna?”

When Marco finds Janna, she’s trying to use the spellbook as an aide in relationship counseling.

“Sorry, I kind of need that book to prevent something horrible from happening!”

Janna’s clients run away from the impending confrontation; Marco yanks the book up from the table where Janna and her clients had left it. He throws open the heavy cover of the tome, looking through to the table of contents. It’s, it’s-

He can’t read it.

“Janna, what did you do to this book?”

Janna shrugs, completely non-apologetic. “I changed the language setting.”

“There’s a language setting?” he asks. Then he pauses. “Wait, this book has _settings?_ ”

“Duh, it’s a _magical_ book, Marco. I think the language options are on page 1729i. Or maybe it was 1729k?”

“Janna!”

“What? You can’t seriously be complaining that I wanted to read the book in it’s native Mewnish form?”

“This is _Klingon_ , Janna.”

“Yeah, and? Sue me.”

The language settings are on page 1729i after all. Even as Marco starts flipping through the book, looking for the table of contents, Janna continues to look over his shoulder.

_Table of Contents (Last Edited - 1809, Gregorian Calendar):_

_How to Use This Book - pg. 1_

_Elementalism - pg. 16_

_Allomancy - pg. 72_

~~_Tulpamancy - pg. 157_ ~~ _Redacted for user safety, refer to Golemancy_

_Economancy - pg. 384_

_Diplomancy - pg. 463_

_Golemancy - pg. 590_

_Teleomancy - pg. 604_

_Fundamentamancy - pg. 711_

_Mancymancy - pg. 888_

Ugh, this is completely useless. And annoying. “Janna, stop reading over my shoulder, please.”

“But why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Your _face_ says so.”

_Disastromancy - pg. 1015_

Aha! Maybe this is what he’s looking for. “Please, go away, Janna.”

She scoffs. “I already photocopied all of the good bits, so there’s no point. Your tyrannical monopoly on magic can’t last forever!”

“Uh-huh. I’m in the middle of a crisis, so…?”

She leaves.

_Common magical disasters, and their solutions: a curated guide:_

_What to do if you encounter a gravitational singularity - pg. 3_ _3_

_What to do if you encounter a technological singularity - pg. 3^^^3_

_What to do if you open the gates of hell and unleash the endless font of corruption - pgs. 616 to 666_

_What to do if you fall into a bottomless milkshake and can’t get out - pg. 911_

_What to do if you do not exist - pg. e_ _iπ_ _+1_

 _What to do if you are trapped in a hypothetical situation - pg._ _א_ _0_

 _What to do if_ ~~_that goddamn thing_ ~~ _[I, Who Will Be One With All] is encroaching upon your universe - pg. [N/A]_

_What to do if you are being held hostage in an alternate universe - pg. 5N4K3_

_What to do if you are being held hostage in a possible future - pg. 5P00K7 5N4K3_

_What to do if P_ _≠_ _NP and you are only mathematically and causally consistent while P_ _=NP - pg. 404_

_What to do if you stain the fabric of space-time and the local dry-cleaners are closed - pg. 21_

“No! Don’t you have _anything_ about Mewberty?”

 _What to do_ ~~_if_ ~~ _when indexing systems fail you when you need them most - pg. ???_

Nope.

_What to do if you create artificial life out of billions of sophont souls and it resents the sacrifice that went into its creation: a primer for the expecting mother - pg. 144000_

_Definitely_ not.

_What to do if you buy so much time that you put yourself into debt - pg. 9327_

Ugh… does this thing have a glossary, or anything? Wait, no, it mentions Mewberty right here:

_What to do if Mewberty goes wrong and your mask becomes a boy instead of a girl - pg. 1284_

_What to do if Mewberty goes wrong and your mask becomes a girl instead of a boy - pg. 1285_

_What to do if Mewberty goes wrong and your mask becomes a prison of glamourflesh - pg 1286_

_What to do if Mewberty goes wrong and you are become Death, Destroyer of Worlds - pg. 4_

But that isn’t helpful either. He starts turning towards the back of the book, but thirty seconds later, he’s still turning pages. He closes the book, and then opens it anew from the back cover. There are still more pages to go through.

“Janna! Does this thing have a glossary?”

“Find it yourself!”

Marco is in luck, though, because the book leaps in his hands, rotating and turning and paging in three directions at once. And then:

“Did somebody say Glossaryck?”

And then there’s a _smurf_ hovering over the surface of the book.

“Because he- _llo_ , that’s me! Sir Glossaryck of Terms! I’m at your esteemed service, m’lady.” The smurf looks from side to side almost conspiratorially, before leaning in and up, and whispering to Marco. “I must say, you look much better than the last princess.”

What. The. Fuck-

“I’m not a milady,” Marco splutters.

“Yeah, that’s what they all say, kid.”

What?

The creature puts on a pitched voice. “‘Oh, Glossaryck, I’m not a girl! I was only raised as a girl so that I could carry on the matrilineal line of succession!’”

“Um, seriously-”

“‘Oh, Glossaryck, I’m not a girl! I was only raised as a girl to avert a terrible prophecy!’ ‘Oh, Glossaryck, I’m not a girl! I was only raised as a girl because I showed an affinity for the moon!’ ‘Oh, Glossaryck, I’m not a girl, I just fell into a cursed spring!’”

“-I’m not a girl!” Marco yells, a bit too sharply.

“Hah! If you are a boy, then I am Miss Multiverse. Which is to say, neither of those things are true: I am an ugly blue dwarf, and you are a ‘milady.’”

Marco growls. “I am _not_ a girl! I am not a milady!”

“Uh huh. Can we get on with it, kiddo? What do you need me to look up?”

 _Anything to help a friend._ “Just… look up ‘Mewberty’, please.”

Glossaryck squints. “You don’t look like you’re going through Mewberty to me.”

“It’s for a friend.”

“That’s what they all say, kid.”

“But I really really mean it, this time!”

The creature rolls his eyes. “Alright, let’s see… Mew, Mewling, Mewni, Mewtonian dynamics, Mewtonian fluids, Mew Year’s Day…”

“Go back a bit,” Marco says. “I think you missed it.”

“Did I? Mmm… Mewbermensch, Mewbleck… oh, here we go. Mewberty. Right next to the table of contents.”

The book pages fly into a flurry, descending backwards several thousand steps.

“Hold on a moment, it looks like the pages are stuck together here. Let me fix that-”

There is a splattering of purple ink and purple hearts, pouring out from the book.

“Tada! Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here after the show.”

Marco leans over the book. “Glossaryck? That is your name, right?”

“Yes. Don’t wear it out.”

“I can’t read this.”

Glossaryck gasps. “You mean your mother didn’t teach you how to read ancient Babel?”

“No.”

“Goodness me, what is this world coming to? These younger generations, I swear…”

“Can you translate it?” Marco asks.

“If I could have, I would have. Whoever wrote this FAQ did it before they added the language systems to the book and never bothered to update their software.”

“No, I mean, can you translate it manually? Read what it says to me?”

“I just had a great idea,” Glossaryck says. “I can translate it manually by reading what it says to you.”

“I just said that,” Marco says.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Princess Marco. Now, let’s see… ‘Mewberty can be an exciting time for the young royal Mewman, but it can also be very scary. To alleviate normal concerns, we’ve compiled a list of questions and answers…’”

“Skip to the bit about how to stop it,” Marco says. Glossaryck laughs.

“Stop it? Oh, you should have said so. You can’t stop it.”

“Don’t you have…” Marco searches for the right word. “Mewberty Blockers, or anything like that?”

“Ah, you might as well try to ‘block’ the tide. No can do.”

Marco thinks for a moment. “So you’re saying it’s merely very very _very_ difficult, but not impossible in execution?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Look, Princess Marco-”

“It’s _Marco._ ”

Glossaryck looks Marco up and down. “So you’re _not_ Princess Marco, celebrity extraordinaire?”

“No.”

“You’re _not_ Princess Marco, multinet personality, liberator of Princesses everywhere?”

“No!”

“Huh, I must have gotten my timelines all mixed up. Forget I said anything.”

“You little-” Marco chokes herself ( _himself!_ ) off. “Tell me how to stop Star’s Mewberty!”

“Star Butterfly, huh?” Glossaryck holds up a hand, examining a fingernail. “Marco, I’m afraid that Mewberty is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult, for the royal Mewman. You shouldn’t want to stop it, anyways.”

“That doesn’t mean I _can’t_ stop it. Star seemed to think it was a good idea.”

“There are lots of things she thinks are a good idea, that doesn’t mean they are.”

“Turning purple is always a bad idea, though, so staying normal must be a good idea.”

“Turning purple is _not_ a bad idea,” Glossaryck says. “I do it every Sunday!”

“Star has gone completely boy-crazy!” Marco retorts. “Do you do _that_ , too?”

“Well, yes, but… wait, how boy-crazy are we talking?”

“Too crazy!” Marco says.

“Hmm… so dramatic a change means she might be having a mewmonal imbalance… how long as this been going on for? Does she already have the purple heart thingies?”

“Less than an hour, that I know about, and yes.”

“Hmm.” Glossaryck rotates a few times, holding a six-fingered hand to his chin. “Well, maybe there’s something I can do, to make this safer...”

This is, unfortunately, when all hell breaks loose. There is a distant scream of terror, and Marco forgets about Glossaryck completely. The sky is mostly darkened, covered with clouds the color of bruises and grape medicine, and the floor is slippery with something that does not smell like water.

It smells like mothballs, and Marco leaves Glossaryck behind completely.

In the open hall, Star Butterfly’s body lies open on the floor, an empty hollow of purple paper-mache and hearts. Every boy with a line of sight to the thing has already been covered from head to toe in resin, and something new is crawling out of the ruin and wreckage. Six arms, impossibly huge compound eyes, hooked joints-

“Star!” Marco screams. He screams until his voice is raw.

Star lifts Oskar Greason and his car into the sky, past the dark clouds. Oskar’s car hits the ground thirty seconds later.


	7. Chapter 7

It takes two days before Star opens up to him.

“Do you remember that dimension with the sapient hermit crabs?” she asks quietly. She hasn’t spoken once, just clutching onto her body like a lifeline.

“I remember.”

“I wish I never had to grow up,” Star says, leaping back to the heart of the conversation.

 _No-one wants to grow up_ , Marco almost says. He crushes the thought under his tongue.

“What happened to you?” Marco asks. And Star smiles, horribly bitter. It is a look that doesn’t fit her. He wishes she would never dream of feeling that way.

“I got too big for my shell,” Star says. “Too big for my mask. You know I’m not human. How do you think I ever faked it?”

She’s so sad, he can’t stand it.

“I don’t care if you’re not human,” Marco says. “I don’t care what you really look like.”

“Thank you,” Star says sadly. But she shakes her head. “I don't know, I was so used to being human and mewman that being royalty again was the most awful thing I’ve ever felt. There was nothing. I was no-one.”

Marco hugs her. Her body has been both more and less bony ever since it happened.

“It hurt so much that I wasn’t thinking,” Star admits. “I couldn’t _think_ the way I would right now. My old shell was broken because I had changed and grown, but there was nothing stopping me from making another.”

Marco’s blood runs cold.

“I think,” Star’s voice cracks. “I’m so sorry. I think I did something really, really, _really_ bad.”


End file.
